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So what use would tactical voting have been?

Labour supporters are trying to blame the Green Party for Labour’s failure at the election. So let’s have a reality check. I worked out how many extra seats Labour would have won if the Greens had all voted Labour, and found 12. Putting the Tories on 319 seats. Four short of a majority. Meaning that a Conservative government was still inevitable. But either another ConDem government or (more likely and much worse) Conservative/Democratic Unionist Party. A party that is anti-abortion and homophobic.

Congratulations everyone who voted Green. That’s what you saved us from. A coalition that would actively make the Tories worse!

And Labour, the blame is entirely at your feet. Possibly if you’d had a better election campaign than “We’re another bunch of pro-austerity economic illiterates – just not quite as bad as the Tories” then you would have had people who actually wanted to vote for you. Rather than losing your votes to Farage and then blaming us.

And you do not own the Green vote. Some of us have hard lines you cross. Many of us will tell you that if you support Frakking and want our votes you can frack off! One of my personal lines is still the Iraq War – I’ll never knowingly vote for anyone who voted for that (which didn’t stop me voting for Jeremy Corbyn in 2005).

As for what harm would 8 MPs have done? Would they have been able to make abortion illegal? No. But it’s possible to restrict access to abortion without banning it. The sort of tricks Nadine Dorries loves to try. The DUP supports homophobic conscience clauses. And all they need is to sneak one or two of those into the back of Tory bills to make a Tory government even worse. All the economics of the Tory party with homophobia and mysogeny on top. By voting Green you stopped the DUP gaining a massively disproportionate amount of influence.

Remember: It could have been worse. And Tory/DUP is even worse than pure Tory. This is what the Labour Party are blaming us for not ending up with.

And that we almost had the DUP (of all people) holding the balance of power is yet another reason the voting system needs to change.